The increasing success of the Internet as a platform for electronic commerce is indisputable. Countless items, both tangible (such as household items, electronic devices, and the like) and intangible (such as digital copies of songs, movies, software applications, and the like) are bought and sold through Internet-based merchants every day. The ever-increasing ease of access to the Internet for even unsophisticated users, as well as the ever-increasing number of options for billing customers for Internet-based transactions, have helped fuel the proliferation of Internet-based commerce.
Unfortunately, the growing amount of Internet-based commerce has led to a growing amount of fraud in Internet-based transactions. Whether through the use of stolen personal information of legitimate users, or through the exploitation of security flaws in various Internet commerce platforms, detecting potentially fraudulent transactions has become a serious issue that must be addressed by Internet-based merchants. While no system is likely to prevent or detect all fraudulent transactions, what is needed is a way to collect additional data that can help identify which transactions are potentially fraudulent so that such transactions can be carefully monitored or reviewed before fulfillment, or so that future transactions with the same party can be avoided.